Someone has been leaving stuff in the recycling room.  

The tiny blue piano is missing a leg, although someone compassionate has made do by jamming in a tight-rolled wad of tissue so that it manages to stand, wobbling at the slightest pressure on its painted metallic keys. I lift it gently, feeling an immediate kinship to the piano’s precariousness in life, its ability to continue existing despite what some might term a significant loss. The piano is only the size of two hands, twenty keys from low A to high C. Who had owned her? Could her possessor have been a musician, a collector, an oblivious beauty who couldn’t comprehend that the piano didn’t deserve to be here, not by the thick-stemmed wineglasses, smudged and clumsy like drunk men jeering at whoever didn’t find their brashness funny? 

Someone loved you once, I tell the piano, but she disagrees.

You know that isn’t true. How can you throw out someone you love? 

Confounded by this directness, I cradle the piano and we leave the recycling room. 

#

At my dual-screen workstation, messages dart back and forth winking seductively about their contents. My mouse clicks quietly and the headache I constantly nurse remains a hum, generated by what I presume is my tenderly swollen frontal lobe.  

            Click for a face to bloom, to become a spreadsheet in which sprawls a town of upright honest citizens who – no, it is the profit-expenses-and-revenue forecasts for the next financial quarter. 

            My own name pulse at the top of a lengthy column of emissaries, and its gangly K – last and friendliest of all – advises I shoulder up and get ready. 

            Click, click, and there blooms a personal message. 

                        Hey mate dot dot dot 

            I do have a mate. A colleague, whose name is David, who is dot-dot-dot-ing now. I make an especially substantial effort to speak, think and act typical around David because he makes such a substantial effort to speak and act like I am typical. Even like he finds my company enjoyable. 

            While he’s still dot-dot-dot-ing, I go for it. 

Hey mate

Mirroring is a technique and a tool I was taught in therapy, and the alliteration of that doesn’t pass me by because alliteration never does. It grabs me by the goujon like a first-time fisty and exactly as subtle. 

David’s innermost thoughts bloom on my right-hand screen. 

I know it’s short notice, but can you review those forecasts for Thursday morning?

The letters trip over themselves to assemble into words that line up in perfect syntax and significance.  

Yes I can

Dot dot dot Legend. Thanks Nick

David’s gratitude throbs gently in the corner of my screen, and I remember what it was like to be the daily recipient of emotions which would bathe me in yellowy blue safety, liquid and soft. 

#

Today it is a fluffy red glove, not in the box marked Take Me! but fallen by the wheel of the hulking grey bin designated for recycling Other–No Broken Glass Please. I sense the owner of the tiny blue piano, and I squeeze the wool tight, fuzziness oozing through my fingers like slow-moving lava. 

            She has petite hands. This too is dangerous, as I lay my hand against the glove and hold its fat flaccid fingers. (Fee fi fo flap, I’m unable to resist thinking.)   

            Were you abandoned or forgotten? Because there’s Samaritans and Unicef right round the corner for clothing donations, and giving objects a chance for redemption is the sustainable, future-friendly choice. 

            My eardrums shatter at the crack of a metallic whip against the back of an enslaved golem. 

            The door to the recycling room bounces against the wall as a woman enters in a clatter of hooves and dropped chopsticks, surrounded by a cloud of smoky sweetness. 

            ‘There it is!’ Her voice is throaty and rough, sandpaper behind my eyes that makes me stagger back.

            She stalks to me and snatches the red glove out of my hand, her perfume a punch upside my nose. ‘Thanks.’ 

            When I regain my voice, it is quiet, weird and embarrassing. ‘You’re most welcome.’ 

            ‘You’re well courteous, aren’t you mate?’ She turns and stamps out in a symphony of percussion and cymbal, relentless despite its brevity. The left behind scent envelops me in a haze of purple phallic flowers whose oversized ribbed stamen are alarmingly charred.

#

A week passes with no additions to the Take Me! box, wherein each evening I gaze into its dwindling contents, met only by the chunky wineglasses that nobody wants. 

            That’s right, nobody. How do you like them apples? 

            The wineglasses don’t rise to my bait, four silent goons debriefed of their jefe and emptied of purpose. I trace my finger along a thick rim and decide to take them home, upside down and two to a hand like piglets strung up for ham.  

            Didn’t you say you would fix everything?   

            The piano is where I left her, in front of all my other rescues. They are sullenly huddled – the stained white vase like a squat swan with brown-streaked wings; the torn poster print of lush flowers, pollen weeping from their hearts; the warped tree branch carved with two names inside a clumsy heart. None of them had ever spoken to me the way the piano did.

            I promise I will fix everything. I’m well courteous. 

            The sandpaper voice scratches against the inside of my head, leaving me raw and sensitive. In the middle of the night, I drink tap water out of the wineglasses and imagine whose lips and tongue they last touched. They are opaque in the darkness as if it would hurt them to say.

            On Saturday afternoon, there is an explosion over the Take Me! box. Deep red petals, sinewy green stems, tiny tight magenta blossoms and long leaves shiny with dew, or wax. A crimson ribbon lies untied.

            And then I see the note, a ripped strip of unlined paper. The handwriting is angular and heavy, blue ink pressed into the yielding whiteness so hard it’s left grooves.

                        I’m always watching you

            As the letters undulate and make promises about security, stability and foreverness, I am bathed in a rainbow that radiates over my face and under my clothes like a full-body blow job in front of the rose forest left to remind someone they were loved. 

            The door opens with a thud of handle against wall and the woman with the sandpaper voice steps in, her body bisected by the door that she grips with one hand while she tosses an oversized greeting card into the Containers Only bin.

‘Hey,’ she grunts. 

‘Hel –‘ but she’s gone before I can articulate a greeting and ask why she doesn’t like roses. 

#

At work drinks, David is telling me about a woman he has just bedded. Someone he began exchanging pictures with on an app, and whose wit and charm by text message was almost as attractive as the rack on her. Most excitingly of all, she is a redhead who has fulfilled his hopes and expectations. 

            ‘Mate, the carpet is as advertised,’ he tells me. The hum of conversation and soft rock thrumming from the speakers above the terrace blanket us in a cocoon from which there is no escape, and I suck down more of my pale ale. 

            It has been almost a year since I joined this company, a financial services former startup that has since scaled up and needs people like me – who the founder termed “less socially enthusiastic” – to take on behind-the-scenes tasks of monitoring market trends and feeding algorithms with information to keep on disrupting and innovating. 

            ‘Going to see this one again.’ David taps the neck of his beer bottle against mine, a sharp, cold sound that for a second illuminates a potential escape from the avalanche of things I don’t want to think about.

            Almost a year since Trisha, almost a year since I moved into the flat. Everything happened almost a year ago, and had something been the first, the tripwire for the rest of my life to tumble down? So much for till death do us.  

            ‘You’re a lucky man,’ I say gloomily. ‘From my experience, it usually isn’t as advertised.’ 

‘Mate! You sly dog.’ David chuckles and slaps me on the shoulder. ‘Who you seeing then? You aren’t married, are you?’ 

If he only knew. And I think, he could know. Maybe it would be okay, almost a year later. 

            ‘Far from,’ I say. ‘Mate.’ 

            ‘Yeah?’ David leers so encouragingly at me, I realise I have finally found someone who would understand. 

            So I tell him about Trisha, how we got married out of university, put down a mortgage, tried and failed to have children, and one day I began to find things that I couldn’t forget about. A notebook of unlined paper, empty with half the pages torn out. My sunglasses, twisted around the nose bridge. A cracked water carafe, snapped spatula, two pans with burnt out bottoms. A single pink rose on the pavement outside our terrace house, its head flattened. The stopped watch that finally made me understand – I had run out of time. And after my realisation, this enlightenment spread out of me and lit up the only things that had been honest in my life – my possessions. And so did the other items speak up then, one by one explaining what they knew of my wanton wife.

The paper she used to write disposable love notes, my sunglasses she had crumpled in the heightened emotionality I adoringly tolerated each month. The household items she destroyed as excuses to get out of the house and purchase replacements. The roses I sent from work, trashed and smeared to ram the message home. The watch that wasn’t mine. All these tales corroborated and of course she denied everything, but it wasn’t hard to follow her on the frequent occasions she said she had to leave home. Then it was proven over and over that the objects had been honest and she was lying. The guy wasn’t even much better looking or fitter than me, so what was the point? They were so careless with their foolery in his semi-detached bungalow in a slightly nicer part of town, it was at least four times that I had to see her middle-aged thighs wobble and quiver against his fervent thrusts at another man’s bird.  

 ‘Mate,’ David says finally. ‘Too much information. Also, you can’t talk about women like that.’ 

#

When I find the access pass next to the recycling bin for bottles, I realise it’s a sign, my only opportunity to signal my interest in the owner of the tiny blue piano. The laminated card on a lanyard is from the local hospital and more importantly is emblazoned with her face.

Her name is Lamia. Written in black poker-straight lettering that assures me of its candour and directness, of the professional alacrity with which it would tell me when I was too little too weird, too unimportant to be so much trouble and everyone has had enough. The kind of swift honesty that I can do without.

            I flip the pass over to avoid further rejection and there it is, my second, kick-up-the-bum do-it-you-loser sign. 

                        IF FOUND PLEASE RETURN

This decisive lettering makes me tuck the pass into my trouser pocket, scrawl my own note on my own torn unlined paper and pin it to the lobby bulletin board. 

            Not desperate at all, I tell the note and it doesn’t disagree, for which I’m grateful. 

            I wake up in the night, my head itching with the idea that she dropped the pass intentionally, knowing it would be me, it was always me, who picked up the precious things passed over by other people.  

#

The knock on the door has to be her and is her and I gape like a muppet whose cloth tongue has been torn off its flat felt mouth, unable even to pretend it can speak. 

            She uses her sandpaper voice to revive me, Lamia standing there across my threshold in black boots and blue jeans, a mole on her right cheek that semaphores come-hither signals to my already fragile gut. 

I nod furiously that yes-I-have-your-pass and hand the goods over, reminding myself that I am probably fabricating the violet sparks that leap between our hands. And Lamia continues speaking. 

‘I’ve been seeing you around. You just moved in?’  

 ‘Last April.’ 

It seems to displease her. ‘Used to be a lot better here. Community, I mean. People’d know each other’s faces. Now we’re just numbers and paper pretend dolls to them with all the shots.’

Her voice is a discordant music and I am a teenager worshiping at her altar, never wanting her low rasp to end. With a monumental effort built on my therapist’s most frequent reprise, I say, ‘I hear you.’ 

When she leaves, Lamia smiles, lopsided and guarded, a glimpse of teeth that promise danger and exhilarating threat. ‘Cheers, Nick. Not too many strangers care about the stuff someone’s dropped.’

I make a joke, yes I do. ‘I’m not a stranger. Just strange,’ I say, and she laughs a surprised laugh, as if I’m a late-night talk show host whose teeth are as seductive and surreally white as hers. 

#

I bump into Lamia when we are both on our way to the supermarket. Over the avocados flown in from Peru, each one burbling tiny last gasps about dehydration and the violation of enforced ripening, she tells me about the unsavoury types that have moved into the area over the last ten years. Investment bankers, marketing directors, executives of all descriptions but especially those in the financial services, all of whom had taken over flats originally designated for lower income households and key workers, in some cases directly causing evictions due to under the table rent negotiations. The place is going to shit, she explains, and I vow never to mention my crummy company, which now that I think of it, I may quit. Anything is possible now that I’m over Trisha. 

            ´You’re not like those types,’ I say, but she scoffs and says she sold out, sold her soul for less than a pretty penny that nobody had tossed her anyway, which made her talentless and stupid on top of it. 

            I nearly ask her then whether the abandonment of the blue piano was linked to her previous career as a pianist, but the avocados remind me that their assault goes all the way to the seed. 

            ‘I don’t think you should get those,’ I say. 

            ‘All right Captain Opinion, what do you recommend?’

            ‘Apples. Pears.’

            ‘Well, that won’t work on nachos, will it?’ Lamia dumps two avocados in her basket and stamps away. 

            On the eight-minute walk back, we are silent and I desperately try to bring up the six-pack of beer that is one of two items in my single carrier bag. Lamia is in command of three overflowing bags, which she had refused to let me help with in case I decided to thieve her groceries for myself. 

            We reach our shared gate and Lamia passes her fob over the scanner before I can fumble mine out. I gesture gallantly for Lamia to enter and she turns left, away from the elevators that will ferry us to our homes.

            ‘Wait, where are you going?’ I say.

            ‘Going for a smoke. Lighting up here is a bit naff.’ She gestures at the courtyard where two kids in school uniform are yelling at a boy on a skateboard, while a woman jerks a stroller back and forth and calls to a toddler yanking on a swing in the shape of an elephant’s head.  

‘I smoke too. Can I come?’ A lie, which my therapist cautions is no way to impress someone and that I am likely to appreciate life more when I am able to express my truth, but who is to say I won’t take up smoking in this new shared reality with Lamia?

#

On a wall by the carpark surrounded by plastic bags at our feet, Lamia lights a hand-rolled cigarette. I pat my empty pockets theatrically for the pack of cigarettes I plan to buy later, and am thrilled that when Lamia notices, she offers me not a fresh cigarette but the one between her lips.

            ‘Cheeky so-and-so, following me to crib my spliff.’ She rolls her eyes but smiles and my confidence soars. 

By the time the funk of the smoke claws into my nose, I am already dragging heroically on the filter-tip and my lungs fill with a hot, gritty thickness that makes me sputter. 

            ‘Pass it back then,’ Lamia says when she finishes laughing.

            There is a cloud passing through my brain and soothing its sunburned plateaus, singing its livid mountains to sweet snug oblivion. Lamia’s curls spring around her face like angels welcoming the uninitiated to the utopia that is Lamia’s nose between the thick flesh of her cheeks that fall to a heavy jaw. He neck is only part hidden by the collar of her leather jacket, lit by the glowing ember of the joint against maroon lips that are sultry, velvety pillows I want to lay myself upon. I realise I am high. 

            ‘So you smoke, eh?’ she says. 

            ‘I tried it twice.’ My tongue has been loosened by this truth serum, but Lamia doesn’t seem to care or notice. 

            ‘Got one of those beers?’ 

            We crack open our cans and the sound merely tickles, causes the barest of exuberant sparkles dancing along Lamia’s hand.   

            ‘What’s your story, Nick?’ she says. ‘Why haven’t I seen you if you’ve been living here over a year? Because you know, I do know everyone. They might not know me, but I’m always watching.’

            Her words try to start a polka in my brain but it is stoned out and I become engrossed in my shoes, which are like oil paintings, the white deep and dirtied, the blue thick and wet as if created afresh just for me. The laces slither over the front in a licentious display of laidback leisure. Finally I say, ‘My wife cheated on me,’ and the five words almost puncture the bliss suffusing my head. I try it out again, repeating the words and Lamia seems to understand. 

            ‘Sorry, it’s too much information,’ I say, remembering David. 

            She touches my shoulder for a second and my chest enters free-fall. ‘People who say that don’t know what it means to know anyone. We’re all human beings, Nick. Everyone shits.’ 

            With her encouragement, I say it twice more and by the final time, they are just words again, not knives or needles or teeth that come in the dark and silence when I sit upright in bed, tugging at myself until I come in a joyless paroxysm that sedates me into greyscale sleep.    

            Lamia says, ‘You’re not the only one who’s done things people’d never believe of you.’   

            I don’t want to tell her that everything I did, every sad, silly act of rejection, was exactly in character. So I take a sip of beer and try to look as cool and independent as Lamia, like my bad decisions were also adventurous and outrageous and worth talking about someday.  

#

The wineglasses won’t shut up about Lamia. They jeer at me for not nailing her, not copping a feel or finding out what even is her deal with dudes.  

            Be quiet, I say with a death stare, but they’ve regained the bluster that made me hate them off the bat, and even my threat to smash them directly into the big bin does little to damp their awful commentary. 

            I bring the wrong things home. 

            This I realise in the dead of night, jacking myself like a reanimated corpse. 

            I get up and go to the piano. She breathes innocence at me, the truth hanging heavy off her painted lopsided frame. 

            She says it’s all very good to take in those who are broken but then you need to heal them, not fossilise them for your viewing pleasure. 

            ‘Look, I said I would fix everything.’ The sound of my voice is weedy and limp, and the piano becomes only a blue lame thing missing a limb. There is no truth, weighty or otherwise, and nobody to listen to it. 

            Nonetheless I stay up late, sawing then shaving and sanding a thumb-sized wooden cylinder that could rectify the piano’s problematic stance. 

#

I want to tell Lamia it’s her who has changed me. But how to prove it? 

            I line up the newly steady piano, the scrubbed swan vase, and the tree branch with its carvings sanded to faintness. Behind them are more of my rescues, radiating a faint hope that makes me feel simultaneously heroic and guilty.

            Lamia doesn’t even notice I’ve changed. Reminds me she’s known me all of two weeks and that from what she can see, I’m a guy that returns dropped objects, doesn’t pilfer groceries and is all right to have a beer with.          

            ‘Doesn’t mean I’ll come into your flat to see this ‘something you want to show me’,’ she says, lighting a cigarette and striding off. 

            I scurry after her since she had agreed I could accompany her to the supermarket. Her smoke in my nostrils is burnt and dangerous and my eyes water but I don’t ask her to switch her smoking hand. 

            The first thing we see in the supermarket are the roses. Bursts of crimson warpped in glimmering translucent paper, they implore me to take heed of the sign above their bright red heads.

ARE YOU READY TO SHOW SOMEONE YOU LOVE THEM? 

            ‘Roses. Just too much, isn’t it?’ I am coiled to snatch up a dozen if she disagrees. 

            Casual like anything, Lamia says she dislikes flowers, hates roses most of all. ‘Can’t stand the smell, or those curled together petals all soft like baby skin. Know who’s the only person that ever sent me roses? Doesn’t know me from Eve and is so damn oblivious he doesn’t even know that.’

            ‘Is he your…?’ The words choke in my throat.        

            ‘I got him put away,’ she says, and for the first time in a long time, there is total silence behind my eyes. 

            I scan my items while Lamia waits, her shopping at her feet. The voluptuous William pears are the last to pass, and Lamia says, ‘Everyone needs help sometimes. Sometimes you get to be the one who gives it.’ 

            The pears are perfectly ripe, and I wonder if in some small way they, and I, could make Lamia happy. 

            She adds, ‘Usually not though. So save your energy.’ 

#

The wineglasses are having a silent spell, and I seize the opportunity to gather them by their stems and take them out the way I’d brought them in. 

            In the recycling room, the Take Me! box is empty, as it has been for the past two weeks. I walk past the box until I am in front of the half-full Everything Else big bin. The wineglasses stay quiet as I toss them one by one onto a bed of crumpled packing boxes.  

Except for the last wineglass, which is still gripped in my hand when it starts to brag about being strong and silent and nailing all the birds. And I grab one of the boxes, hold it against the inside of the big bin, and smash the wineglass until I’m holding only the jagged ugly stem. I drop the box and the broken shards inside deflect enough light that they appear beautiful. 

By Natasha Stokes

dark comedy Loneliness obsession psychological fiction unreliable narrator